


Three Choices

by Evidence



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Fix-It, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-11
Updated: 2012-03-11
Packaged: 2017-11-01 19:11:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/360263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evidence/pseuds/Evidence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A sort of fix-it fic for the end of ME3.  Has spoilers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three Choices

**Author's Note:**

> The inconsistencies at the end of Mass Effect 3 (along with a few other things) I have been haunting me since I finished it. This is basically my attempt to make some better sense of them for myself.

 

 

Three choices.

 

No choices.

 

Shepard stares ahead of herself, dizzy and half-dead.  It wasn’t this painful the last time she was dying.  Fewer burns.  Less air, too.

 

The boy in front of her shimmers for a moment.  Flickers, like the lights on Omega.

 

There’s no time.  It’s running out fast, she knows, slipping slick and red through her fingers as she stands there.  There’s so much she wants to say.  So much outrage and pain and panic boiling in her chest, but for some reason, she can’t find the words.  The boy is important.  She has to… listen… to what he says.  Has to trust in him.

 

There’s something wrong with that concept, she knows.  Something wrong with all of these concepts.  Organic and synthetic life cannot coexist… but that’s not right… except it is.  It has to be.  The Reapers… maybe they aren’t as bad as she thought.  Maybe it’s just a misunderstanding.

 

Or they are, and her only choice is to destroy them.  And the geth.  But she has always fought the geth.

 

Except, no, that’s not right either.  There’s something… someone… E… EDI.  EDI’s not like the geth.  Shepard doesn’t hurt her friends, not if she can help it.  EDI’s her friend.  EDI’s important to Joker, and the geth were important to… to someone else.  To exosuits and glowing steps in a void.  Rocks carried home.   _I never thought I would mourn a geth._   Shattered N7 armour tumbling to the ground.

 

Yes, that’s right.  That’s the problem.  She just needs to get rid of the Reapers.  To control them, order them off like soldiers on the battlefield.  The other, he couldn’t do it.  But she can do it.  She’s stronger.  Isn’t she?  Hasn’t she always been strong?

 

But she doesn’t feel strong.  Not now.  Now she can barely stand.  Maybe she isn’t strong enough after all.

 

There’s strength in unity.  If she could bring them all together… if she could end this conflict, once and for all… maybe it wouldn’t be so bad…

 

She takes a staggering step forward, and that’s when she feels it.  Ghosting over the back of her mind.  A note, small and dark, like the lingering chord of an orchesta.

 

Her steps halt.

 

“What…” she whispers.  There’s something not right.  Something _not right_.  Old memories glow in the corners of her thoughts.  Orange-red light, and horror, and a warning.  _They come, they kill, they take your mind and twist it, make you theirs.  Rob you of yourself.  Alter your perceptions.  Stop them.  Fight them.  Fight, fight, fight._

 

It’s like music slamming into an ocean and drowning in the waves.

 

“Your time is running out,” the boy says, staring up at her with that same strange, inscrutable expression.  “You must choose, while you still can.”

 

_Preserve, destroy, change.  Choose, Shepard.  Save them.  You always knew there would be a cost.  You never believed it would be as simple as turning a switch._

 

She steps forward again.

 

The ground beneath her feet begins to hum.  Like the engines of a ship.  Like the Normandy.  She stops again, and something wavers through her mind.  No.  She can’t… if she dies, she can’t go back.  She’s never wanted to die, not even when things were at their worst, but she’s always been willing to if it came to it.  But this – there was something she wanted to live for.  Go back for.  Some _one._   She promised, and when she did, she found she had never wanted to survive anything more in her life.

 

“You will be dead soon,” the boy notes.  “If you die, you will not be able to act.”

 

She looks at him again.  Her brow knits.  Why is he here?  Is this a dream?  He died, and she doesn’t believe in ghosts.  Especially not ghosts who know so much.  It can't be him.

 

“Why do you look like that?” she asks.

 

“I required a shape.  I chose one that you would speak to,” he replies.

 

A shape.  The shape from her nightmares.

 

How does he know the shape?

 

The song trembles, soothes, but Shepard has caught the thought now.  It sticks against the rough corners of her thoughts, where other nightmares dwell; the long abyss of cipher and prothean.  Where it strikes, the fog begins to dissipate.

 

“You’re in my head,” she realizes, as her legs at last give out, and she staggers back down onto her knees.  Her mind swims – whether from dizziness or something else, she cannot say.  Something urges her back up.  It doesn’t feel like her own compulsion, now.  It feels like something is trying to drag her there.  Just as the Illusive Man had held her.

 

When she looks up again, _it_ is standing in front of her.

 

“You must choose.  Either possibility is acceptable,” he reiterates.

 

Shepard looks towards her three options, and wonders how that’s supposed to work, exactly.  How does blowing up a fuel line kill all the Reapers?  How does throwing herself into a signal beam do anything but incinerate her and disrupt it?  How does seizing the power core give her access to the Reaper consciousness?

 

_They wouldn’t.  But they might be enough to overload the Crucible’s systems and stop it from activating._

 

The floor rumbles beneath her knees.

 

Shepard stares at the being in front of her.

 

“I’m… I…”

 

“You,” it says.  “Must do this.  _Get up_ and **_do this_.”**

 

His voice changes, and she recognizes it.  Her body trembles.   _Someone learned a new tactic._ She lets out a breath, and the black spots already dancing in front of her eyes grow larger and more frequent.  But there is some fighting it now.  It claws and screams, a song becoming a shriek, a lull becoming a cry.  It hurts, but she’s already in too much pain to bother with that now.

 

It’s just like Beneziah said, what feels like centuries ago – it’s much easier to fight when you’re dying.

 

“Harbinger,” she says, the word scraping out of her with less ferocity than she feels.

 

It tilts its head at her.

 

**“Your recognition of us is pointless.  We offer you these chances to break the cycle.  We will not offer them again.”**

 

She laughs, even though it doesn’t sound much like a laugh.  Her own voice is strange in her ears.  The thoughts of her dreams cross her mind.

 

_I wonder how long I’ve been Indoctrinated for?_

 

The pain increases.  She collapses completely, her blood smearing across the floor, her body screaming in protest as her mind burns.  But the sensation passes quickly.  The world of her vision swims, so that she can no longer see the illusion, or the platform, or the battle waging outside.

 

The humming beneath her grows, almost unnoticeable in the midst of this chaos, and a light begins to filter in through the bottom of her vision.  Drifting up from the window.

 

Harbinger is still in front of her, incorporeal and scowling, red and burning now instead of white and peaceful.

 

“You’re interfacing with the Citadel,” she realizes, though the words are less than intelligible once they pass her lips.  She curls in onto herself, clutching her bleeding injuries, too hurt to scream.  “But you’re not really here.  You can’t stop the Crucible, so you need me to do it for you.”

 

**“You are irrelevant,”** Harbinger replies, before flickering into the ghostly form of a Collector instead.  Not that she can make out much of it.  **“The workers of the Citadel will do our bidding.”**

 

Shepard feels the coppery tang and burn of blood at the back of her throat.  Not a good sign.  She spits it onto the ground in front of her.

 

“Yeah,” she says.  “But will they get up here in time?”

 

Harbinger wavers, his image flickering out for a second.

 

The light grows.

 

**“We are eternal.  The apex of evolution,”** he insists.  **“We cannot be stopped.”**

 

Shepard feels tremendous pain and urgency prying against her thoughts, but she’s too far gone to respond to it.  Before the world goes black, she only finds the strength to add a few words.

 

“Guess we’ll find out."

 

As the Crucible fires, the Citadel shakes.

 

_At least I didn’t have to shoot myself,_ is her last thought, as the light and pain burn her away.

 

 


End file.
